“I could have easily fallen into a depression after that, but she wouldn’t let me. She said that he was alive as long as I kept his dreams alive in my heart, and she encouraged me to keep getting up every day, to keep studying and trying, and not to just lie down and give up forever.”
“Somehow, I don’t picture that ever happening,” he said, an image of her squaring her shoulders in the chapel coming to his mind. “You would have gotten back up eventually—though perhaps she was right to push you. Watching someone you love collapse in grief is...hard.”
She searched his face before asking, “Your mother?”
Irritated by the pinch her soft question set off in his chest, he answered with a short nod. “For a time it looked like I might lose her as well as my father. Ultimately she had to leave, so it didn’t matter that she’d got back up. I lost her anyway.”
A thousand questions flashed across her eyes, but she only asked one. “What do you mean, she had to leave?”
Like a terrier, she had grabbed hold of the one thing he’d said with the greatest implication for matters of state. Matters that had not been made public and that he had no intention of ever making so.
And he’d thought her mind was only suited to science. She just might learn to be Queen after all. And, though he’d been enjoying the unfamiliar lightness of their conversation, he didn’t resent this, her inevitable intrusion into his personal life, as it was an opportunity to test her as Queen.
Carefully, he said with casualness, “She was the true target of the assassination.”
Mina stopped in her tracks, completely guileless in her shock. “What? Why does no one know this?”
“Many details around the assassination are classified.”
“Did she leave because she was afraid?”
He laughed, “My mother? That woman has never been afraid a day in her life.” He shook his head. “No. She left because ours is a small island. My father’s memory was everywhere for her, and guilt and grief were killing her.”
“I can understand... But this way it’s like you’ve lost two parents at once.”
Her eyes oozed pain for him and he frowned, not liking the way her empathy felt like a balm. “Now, Mina. Don’t be maudlin. You know there is nothing like losing a parent but losing a parent.”
The bite in his retort had exactly the effect he had been going for. The sympathetic light in her eye dimmed, replaced with a hint of fire.
He continued, “But, as you now know the full story, you must indulge my desire to learn more about the new mother figure inmylife.”
Mina rolled her eyes, but it was a sham to cover up the heart pouring out of them. “I don’t know how I would have made it through without my mother. We adore each other. I have dinner with her two nights a week, usually, and typically stay over on those nights.”
“Interesting...” Zayn noted. “I hadn’t observed that.”
Mina laughed, once again righting the world with the sound of joy.
“Well, not lately. She’s been wanting to take an extended holiday back home in Germany—my grandparents are getting older, you know—and when I learned of my parliamentary interview we both knew I’d be focused on preparing, so she decided to take her trip now. She’s due back midsummer. We’d planned to take a spa weekend together, either to celebrate or soothe, depending on the outcome...”
Her voice trailed off and they both thought of what the outcome had been—something far different from what Mina and her mother had imagined.
Zayn vowed in that moment to make sure Mina’s time at the summer palace made up for the spa weekend she’d missed. He couldn’t reinstate her position on the council—a queen could not sit on the council—and he couldn’t give her back her life as a professor and researcher, but he could at least give her back one of the plans her marriage to him had taken from her.
Her pampering would begin the moment they arrived at the summer palace. But they had to get there first.
“We’re about thirty minutes from the cabin,” he said. “We can make it there before we lose the light. From there it’s less than two hours’ walk to the summer palace, but for that we can wait for daylight.”
Mina nodded. “I’m ready if you are.”
Once again he set the pace, and Mina kept up, this time forgoing any observation notes, and as the last creeping tendrils of light faded on the horizon they stepped suddenly out of the woods into the clearing that housed the palatial log cabin.
Constructed of thick old logs, and large polished stones, the building was designed in a traditional lodge style, with large, scenic picture windows in the center of two outstretched, smooth-timbered wings. Two-storied, it was a commanding structure, made all the more so by the fact that it was the first evidence of mankind they had encountered in miles.
“The cabin is kept stocked with supplies at all times. But unfortunately, it has yet to be retro-fitted with satellite services, so we won’t be able to call from it. It should meet our needs for the night, though.”
Mina merely nodded as he opened the door, gasping when she stepped inside.
Smiling at her wonder, Zayn took in the large exposed beams of the ceiling, the plushly accented open spaces and the enormous central fireplace with nonchalance. “I always thought it was rather rustic and a bit too cozy myself...”